A 26-year-old pregnant woman from Afghanistan, living in a migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, has set herself on fire after her move to Germany was halted at the last moment.
The woman, who has not been named, suffered burns to her face and was attended to by both medics and the fire service. She is now facing arson charges and will soon appear before a court.
She had been temporarily taken to the Hospital of Mytilene but has since been discharged. It is believed that she also received a full psychological evaluation while in hospital.
The woman, who has refugee status, was apparently blocked from moving immediately to Germany because she was eight-months pregnant. However, this right to move to the country has not thus far been halted indefinitely.
In September 2020, the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos burned to the ground, leaving as many as 13,000 people without shelter. The Greek Migration Minister, Notis Mitarachi, said that the fires had been started by migrants because they were quarantined due to a Covid-19 outbreak in the camp. After the fire, many were moved into temporary tents and have now been relocated to other refugee camps or moved abroad.
Conditions in the migrant camps on the island of Lesbos have been described as grim by many observers.
Glatz-Brubakk, a child psychologist with doctors without borders, told an investigation:
"It is living in this constant nightmare of insecurity and uncertainty that is causing children to break down. They don't think it's going to get better. 'I haven't slept for too long, I've been worrying every minute of every day for the last year or two' — when you get to that point of exhaustion, falling asleep and never waking up again is more tempting than being alive."
"They've lost hope that they will ever be treated with dignity, that they will ever have their human rights, that they will be able to have a normal life. Living in a mud hole as they are now takes away all your feeling of being human, really."
Greece currently has 50,000 refugees living in the country but in 2015 alone, as many as 1 million passed through the country on route to the rest of Europe. The influx of refugees was mostly due to the fallout of the Syrian Civil War. There have also been other peaks in refugees entering Greece since 2015, in part due to the opening of the Turkish side of the border at the behest of Turkish leader Recep Erdogan.
[h/t: Greek City Times]
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